Page 8 - Oct 2022

Birt hday, continued from pate 7
Our Mighty Ducks filled a table at the Bell
Buckle Cafe after braving the rain for a party.
Above: Group Captain James Martin Stagg of the
UK Met Office, photo UK Met Office, made the
D-Day call to "go". It's likely that he celebrated ,
after making the right decision to delay
something much stronger than cake.
For D-Day Group Captain James Martin Stagg made what John Ross
in his book The Forecast for D-Day described as the forecast that
"was a pivotal moment in world history". "If Stagg gave the word to
go", Ross wrote, "and the weather turned sour, the lives of thousands
of men and massive amounts of equipment would be lost."
Captain Stagg , a geophysicist by education, and his fellow British and
American weather forecasters had none of the technology we now
associate with predicting (with reasonable accuracy) the weather. They
had to rely on sight observations from civilian and military weather
watchers and from observers on ships at sea. A prediction more than
a day or two in advance of any event, garden party to military landing,
was a speculative business. According to Ross, British forecasters
were further hampered by the fact that unlike forecasters in the USA,
where weather systems could be tracked for days after hitting the
West Coast and moving east, British forecasters operated blind with
the empty Atlantic to their west. [No pressure, here, folks.]
According to Ross, Stagg was troubled by a "parade of storms that
barreled across the Atlantic and into the British Isles," Any one of
these would have stirred up the dangerous waters of the English
Channel, and also provide undesirable cloud cover for the aerial
assault over Normandy. At this point in history If you couldn't see
you didn't fly.
D-Day had been scheduled for June 5th. Despite protests from
Stagg's other colleagues that the weather forecast was good enough
to go as planned, Stagg disagreed. He made the recommendation to
Ike to hold off until June 6th. Ike took the recommendation; D-Day
was launched a day later than planned. On the 6th the weather, while
far from perfect, was good enough for the invasion to proceed.
According to Ross, years later, when President -elect John F Kennedy,
himself a veteran of WWII, asked President Eisenhower on the way to
the inauguration why the Normandy invasion had been so
with
successful, the General replied, "Because we had better
meteorologists than the Germans".
Guy Boye, consulting his technology, a finger, in the air, a few days
before Operation B-Day was to launch, announced, " We're going!" 11
cars turned up at the starting point. There's only one day for an 85th
birthday and making it happen was worth taking a chance on the
weather. This mission was not to be delayed.
At Left: Allan Satterfield, the Healey pilot, gave the WWII V for Victory
sign after getting his top put up in the rain ( with the help of his
friends) at the start of the drive and delivering on a birthday promise
for Janet Olsen. Later, club president Todd Fontechia would help him
jump start the damp ( and therefore aggrieved , Healey) and wrestle its
top down , at the request of the birthday guest, for the return trip. This
was clearly not Janet Olsen's first outing in bad weather. She is made
8
of strong stuff.